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Some winters ago, I found myself jobless and with a young family to support. I had gone back to school to retrain as a teacher, but the additional credential could not secure even a substitute position in a Vancouver school. The job market was soft and my CV lacked classroom experience.
Daily, I broadened the geographical range of my job search until I found a school that would accept me. Ocean Academy, on the tiny Belizean island of Caye Caulker, hired me as its history teacher – over the phone and without references – the catch being that, as a newly founded school in a developing country, it could afford neither a salary, airfare nor living expenses.
My wife and I rented out our 750-square-foot Vancouver apartment for $1,200 a month, rented a 400-square foot fisherman’s shack on flood stilts on Caye Caulker for $300 a month and bought plane tickets with what remained of our savings. With our mortgage payments in Vancouver factored in, we would have roughly $300 a month for food, supplemented by whatever I hoped to write about the adventure or fish out from the lagoon behind our new home.
For my four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, it was the first time they would live next to poverty and on the open ocean. For my wife, it would be her first taste of life without a telephone or hot water, in surroundings of tropical flowers and fruit. As for me, I would have to tough it out daily at a job I mostly loathed, but would be able at the end of the day to rig a dinghy and sail to my heart’s content.
We arrived in Caye Caulker at the start of February and stayed until the end of April. A water taxi deposited us at the end of one of the dozens of piers that jut out of the island. We pushed our four suitcases to the shack on a wooden cart.
That afternoon, we discovered things about our island home that we had not expected. Behind our shack lived a tongueless war veteran from El Salvador and a crocodile; in the front field, scads of kids of all ages played without a parent in sight. Soon our kids, too, were shoeless and out of sight, and happily remained so for much of our stay.
We settled in and then walked around the 7-km-by-1/4-km island. Golf carts and bicycles were the only traffic that passed. As a family, we swam for the first time in tropical waters and afterward ate barracuda and conch barbecued on an open fire. The kids fell asleep cheek to cheek before the sun set and the breeze began to blow. At midnight, the barking of semi-wild dogs drifted through our barred windows.
Ocean Academy was the island’s recent (and first) attempt at a high school. The five teachers on staff welcomed me eagerly. I knew nothing about Belizean history and hoped that some textbooks would be available. None were and the copier was broken. The salt-laced and omnipresent breeze corroded everything. The principal, an elegant former nun, did offer me some classroom management advice: “Send the troublemakers to clear brush in the yard!”
I never did arm my students with the school-stocked machetes. They resented me enough without such measures. They were the sons and daughters of boat-builders and fishermen, and had little patience for classroom confines, plus I was a foreigner trying to teach them their history.
I did teach a few of the boys to box in my spare time, and with one I swapped some poems. But in the end, I couldn’t win the kids over. Indeed, some took to teasing me whenever they spotted me in town, dragging an ever-larger bottle of local rum to my shack. One teenage girl even began to bully my daughter. In a fierce display of frustration and fatherly protection, I publicly threatened to have her expelled. She snickered, but the teasing stopped. By mid-March, our life on the island had become hard.
Rain and Lent brought a festive air to Caye Caulker. The 1,000-plus population soon doubled and Easter feasting took place as mainlanders arrived to visit their islander kin. My wife had convinced me I should finish the semester, and our kids had convinced us we should stay until the end of April. We were invited to the birthday party of an influential island matriarch and attended a Holy Week mass in which a stout and bare-footed Jesuit washed all the parishioners’ feet.
With the last of our funds, we rented bicycles and did one final lap around the island. Then we celebrated the end of our stay with a second restaurant meal.
We departed Caye Caulker on a boat that numbered among its passengers three prisoners. The manacled Rastafarian seated beside me said some kind things about my kids as our shack and the empty beach fast disappeared in our wake.
Now, we relive our life on the island in fragments around the dinner table or when we’re out on the water. Its entirety I have gathered up in a book, which I’ll publish when our memories begin to fade.
Peter Valing lives in Vancouver.